Forgot to carry the one

The change prompted accusations on Thursday from some climate-change denialists that the agency was trying to wave a magic wand and make inconvenient data go away.

That's right: denialists...because we tend to point out that the prevailing data shows no significant increase in warming despite record carbon dioxide levels. But never mind that now! Let's embrace the skew:

At the same time, senior climate scientists at other agencies were in no hurry to embrace NOAA’s specific adjustments.

“What you have is a reasonable effort to deal with known biases, and obviously there is some uncertainty in how you do that,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, who heads a NASA climate research unit in New York that deals with similar issues.

Some experts also pointed out that, depending on exactly how the calculation is done, a recent slowdown in global warming still appears in the NOAA temperature record, though it may be smaller than before.

Maybe, maybe not. Sounds like a lot of hedging goin' on. What is the proximate cause of the miscalculation?

Yet the temperature record is plagued by many problems: thermometers and recording practices changed through time, weather stations were moved, cities grew up around once-rural stations, and so on.

Yes, "and so on." Let's restructure the entire global economy based on this hard evidence of sorta-maybe wacky thermometers and et cetera.